When the kernel boots, and you have a framebuffer working, all of userspace and gnome will probably just work with no modifications.
You might have to play shenanigans like copying a complete filesystem into a ramdisk from the bootloader if your kernel doesn't have support for any IO/networking/storage devices. But you'll still be able to get this screenshot!
Having said that, they have USB working, which is quite an effort, although I'd guess it's an IPCore that a driver already existed for, so it was a simple matter of figuring out memory mappings etc. With USB working, you can make a very usable system, because pretty much any peripheral will work over USB.
Yes, USB is the same Synopsys DesignWare piece of..hardware that you can find on all the Allwinners/Rockchips/Amlogics/whatever. They wrote a driver for the "binding" crap around this to make the controller work, yeah. And some Type-C stuff (Apple handles it in software)
You might have to play shenanigans like copying a complete filesystem into a ramdisk from the bootloader if your kernel doesn't have support for any IO/networking/storage devices. But you'll still be able to get this screenshot!
Having said that, they have USB working, which is quite an effort, although I'd guess it's an IPCore that a driver already existed for, so it was a simple matter of figuring out memory mappings etc. With USB working, you can make a very usable system, because pretty much any peripheral will work over USB.